Page content

Message From the President

The Idea of America, For All People, For All Time

Colin Campbell

A year ago, in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks,
I shared with journal readers my conviction that Colonial Williamsburg
was, as it had been for decades, an emblem of the hope, the justice,
and the resolve on which our democracy had to rely in uncertain
times. The past twelve months have been tumultuous. Marked by
war and the threat of further war, anthrax deaths and fears of
more to come, terrorist alerts, economic instability, corporate
scandal. A year of worry, a year of grief. Over these months my
conviction about Colonial Williamsburg has been only reinforced.

This representation of eighteenth-century thought, culture,
and community; this symbol of political freedom and personal responsibility;
this expression of faith in the future; could not be more relevant,
more material, to the resolution of our nation’s twenty-first
century challenges, and the dilemmas sure to beset us all in all
the times to come.

This summer Colonial Williamsburg commissioned a survey on attitudes
toward those American liberties that were at the heart of the
debates here in Williamsburg more than 225 years ago. The results
were provocative. Forty-nine percent of the 1,000 respondents
were willing to relinquish freedoms and privacies in return for
homeland security. They said as well that freedom of speech, freedom
of religion, and freedom of the press were less important to their
welfare than affordable health care, education, and getting ahead
financially.

Americans are divided over whether to preserve constitutional
guarantees or to compromise basic protections. We appear to assume
the existence of fundamental rights; focus on modern needs and
entitlements. Gordon Wood, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian,
Brown University professor, and Colonial Williamsburg trustee,
said the “results remind us that rights taken for granted
are rights that can easily be eroded or lost. Colonial Williamsburg
is a place where the struggles and precariousness associated with
freedom are represented and explored every day.”

Colonial Williamsburg introduces visitors—among them school
children and their teachers, researchers and vacationers, public
officials and business leaders—to the setting, the debates,
the courage and perseverance from which patriots fashioned the
republic. Here, from woodworkers and from debaters, from brickmasons
and from scholars, from antique objects and from modern television
productions, from working livestock and the World Wide Web, the
future learns from the past. I am confident of that future, and
I am optimistic about America, in no small measure because of
this place, its people, its purpose, and their fidelity to the
ideals so eloquently expressed long ago in this historic city.

Colonial Williamsburg reminds us each day of what is at the
heart of our nation. A visit here is a lesson in the idea of America
and the formation of the republic. That is what Colonial Williamsburg
is about: the idea of America, for all people, for all time.